


Twilight GS: An Epic Re(Re)Write

by intrusive_plots



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: 90s retro, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Explicit Sexual Content, Gore, Gritty Realism, Happy Halloween 2019, Horror, Light BDSM, M/M, Piercings, Pulp, Punk Aesthetic, Rewrite, Sexual Vampirism, Unrealistic Sex, Vampire Politics, Vampires as Incubi, basically everything you'd expect trying to make it with dead people, but like sexy gore, but like sexy horror, fuck-or-die, hah that was already a tag, horny on main, hypersexualism, i just want to write a popcorn novel ok ok, necrophilia - ish, nongritty smut tropes, polyamory if you squint, unrealistic physiology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2020-12-13 21:24:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21004397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrusive_plots/pseuds/intrusive_plots
Summary: There were three things of which Charlie (Jr) was now certain.First, Edward Cullen was a monster.Second; there was a part of Edward - however dominant - that wanted to crack Charlie open and drink him like a cold beer.Third... to be honest, Charlie thought that was kind of hot.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Welcome to Twilight GS: An Epic Re(Re)Write**
> 
> This is the first 'intrusive plot' to monopolize my free time and steal literal years from my life. Please see End Notes for navigation and Editing layout.
> 
> The GS stands for Gary-Stu, the BDSM will not always be safe/sane/consensual (as acts of villainy), this does not pass the Bechdel Test, and comments are being moderated. Ta.

# ✯

**B**ernardo Charles Swan - Charlie to his friends - sat pale and listless in the recess of the Greyhound's sleep-seating, a chubby undersized teenager migrating to spend his Junior year of Highschool in Forks, Washington. The seat was itchy, the long bus cabin stuffy, and Charlie's bladder had started to ache because he had napped through the last two pit stops and didn't yet want to brave the water closet at the back of the bus.

A travel radio a few rows behind him was announcing the country's latest round of gun-related assaults, deaths, arrests, news report interrupted by an advertisement for laundry detergent, cheery jingle popping through the close air of the sparsely occupied cabin.

Charlie's dick laid a little swollen under the heavy press of his cargo jeans, chubbed from his full bladder and the relaxation of his nap. A gummy roadsnack foulness coated the back of his throat and the starter notes of a bloodsugar headache throbbed from in the roots of his eyes outward. The scuffed plexiglass window against his shoulder may or may not have been bulletproof, the passing scenery beyond washed out to the dull monochrome of the cloudy Olympic Coast -- West Coast, Pacific not Atlantic; north of the gunfire. Beads of rain gathered to dribble sideways along the windows, to collide, to disappear into the merge of their small rivers, and Charlie shifted in place to ease the discomfort of his hunger, and his dick twitched at the rough scrape of thick denim inseam through his threadbare boxers.

Charlie closed his eyes, black lashes on a pale face. Bullets flying, lipstick case and potato chip shrapnel, the scream of earbuds ripped free on impact -- but then what would anyone be trying to accomplish, opening fire on a busload of middle-weight Americans the color of boiled oatmeal? As there was no such disaster poised to sabotage Charlie's emigration, he pushed himself up from the sweaty cradle of his seat to wobble stiff-kneed down the narrow aisle toward the water closet.

Charlie sat to relieve his bladder; a Prince Albert pierced through the underside of his cockhead now often made an unfair demand of his aim, demanding the accommodation. He perched on the cool plastic toilet seat with one elbow braced against the flimsy plastic door of the narrow closet, its lock broken some years ago, judging by the buildup of time-worn duct tape layered over a cardboard patch job. It wasn't difficult to imagine someone overdosing in here, or dying of constipation-related heart attack, or old age, or sudden embolism; and the police having to force the lock to get in after the body, and the company too cheap or shellshocked to replace the door.

It wasn't difficult to imagine a runaway kid refusing to answer the demand of the social worker who'd had the bus pulled over to commandeer his or her custody.

It wasn't difficult to imagine the woman who wouldn't know enough English to turn her pimp in to the cops, falling asleep in here because it was close and quiet and private and the suspicious bus driver kicking the door in rather than, yanno, knocking.

The relief of Charlie's emptied bladder spread all the way down to his toes, and he squeezed his dick in hand after shaking out the last hot dribble of urine from off the silver stud at its end as if to congratulate a sporty endurance for the abuse. Glancing at his arm propping the door shut, a wide black wristwatch warned him that there was not enough time to jerk one out before the bus would make its final destination so he might as well get used to feeling restless and irritable, teenage hormones playing unfair cards against his mood at any given moment of the day.

And then of course there was the impulse control disorder, the template Charlie has laid out in his genetics for vulnerability to addiction, for adrenaline or drugs or sex, and him with the smoking habit and coffee stains to hint the worst of it.

Charlie stood in a wobble to tuck his dick back into his boxers, fidgeting some lint from the trimmed line of his pubic hair, then fastened his jeans and his belt a little tighter for comfort against his hunger. He washed his hands listening to motorcycles pass on the highway outside the bus' tin siding, the sputter of their engines not unlike gunfire into the muted muffle of a crowded nightclub.

# ✯

Charlie's father -- Charles Sr, or Sheriff Swan -- was stood waiting at the station platform in the mingling crowd of commuters as the bus pulled in; and his was a barrel-chested make and model of his son, brunette and mustached and bright-eyed, optimistic and forward-leaning the way most community leaders found themselves to be. Where Charlie was doughy and pale by the scenester life he had lived in the sprawling metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, the Sheriff was athletic and tanned by necessity of his countryside occupation. Where Charlie was dour and sarcastic and slow to trust, the Sheriff was warm and forgiving and patient. Where Charlie was outspoken, extroverted and fiercely anti-authoritarian, the Sheriff was quiet, private and socially conservative.

They patronized one other, in a way, and had done ever since Charlie was old enough to recognize and wield profanities; the Sheriff indulgent in Charlie's bravery and independence, and Charlie equally careful with the Sheriff's obvious streak of social anxiety and generalized small-town naivete. Charlie loved his father the way most people might love a particularly slow dog, in a way that owned and protected and fostered companionship, but not in any way that deferred to his authority.

The Sheriff loved Charlie the way a parent was bound to, inevitably, but not in the way that deferred to his bullshit.

The Sheriff stepped out from the station overhang to take Charlie's luggage, offered Charlie a side-hug while cold drops of rain pattered erratically from the scuttling cloudcover. "Safe trip?" the Sheriff goaded, guiding Charlie through the gormlessly shuffling crowd by the back of Charlie's elbow. He clapped Charlie between the shoulders, handed off the second case of luggage from the loading carousel.

Charlie winced. "Well nobody shot up the bus, so, pretty safe, yeah."

The Sheriff chuckled. "What's that? Was Renee worried about that?" His expression fell, just for a moment, doubt flickering in. "Do you want to call her and let her know you made it here all right?"

Charlie shrugged the strop of his bag over his shoulder, and shook his head. "I'm kinda starving," he lead, reticent to give his mother the satisfaction of a phone call, emotional blisters not yet healed.

"Mkay," the Sheriff drawled, suspicious, and lead their meander through the station out to the parking lot, where his Patrol truck sat in brown and yellow and letterprint blue. "I'll answer her next e-mail with your regards; how's that?"

Charlie only looked away, shoulder rising and falling in listless agreement. "Tell her I'm already in jail for smoking pot and tipping cows."

The Sheriff chuckled, wide teeth in a tan face, lined and weathered. "Well there's not much else here as can net you trouble any worse, so, sure. We'll reassure your mom that you're doing normal teenaged things and not, what, plotting the next season of _The Sopranos."_

Charlie rewarded this popculture reference with a magnanimous smirk, the weight in his chest lifting at the reminder that, right, he actually enjoyed his dad's company, as patronized as they were to each other. "Still shuttin' ops down at the Res?" he asked, engaged in the conversation now, the Sheriff's optimism catching. There was plenty of trouble to be found in Forks if one knew where to look -- Charlie would not want for entertainment, even if he had to take a god-honest train to the nearest mall and the Highschool could only boast an entire 500 enrollment cap.

"That was _one_ meth lab, singular," the Sheriff remands, tugging the truckbed hatch open for the luggage. "And the TenTrees' weren't locals. They were tourists who just knew better than to shit where they eat."

A snap of eager intelligence tightened Charlie's eyes, and he rounded the Patrol truck with considerably more vigor than he'd left the bus, scrubbing the bright cold of errant raindrops off the back of his neck and shaking the crumbs of his cheap lunch off his loose black hoodie. He climbed into the passenger seat the same way he used to as a scab-kneed kid, throwing himself in by the elbows to tug the door shut so hard it rocked the truck on its shocks. "Jimothy still acting like a total rooster over that bust, or did you finally promote his ass just to calm him down?"

"Oh James outperformed everyone else so hard last year that he won himself a transfer," the Sherrif said, all teeth, and clipped his key into the ignition. "We were all sad to see him go."

Muted in the roar of the Patrol truck's old engine, Charlie laughed.

# ✯

"- so it's a wheelchair, now, that stupid bastard, and Jake can keep the Ho-Hos out of the house because he's in charge of the groceries. Has to be." The Sheriff tamped the heels of his hands on the wide, thin steering wheel, frustrated. "Might lose a foot, next."

"Jake will lose a foot?" Charlie blinked up from his doze, kicking forward to stretch his legs, finding less foot room in the truck than he remembered, startled to find he sits maybe a bit taller than his dad, now.

"Billy Black will lose the foot, Burns. Diabetes." 

'Burns' was Charlie's regional nickname, a shortening of Bernardo that the extended Native families down at the La Push reservation had bestowed Sheriff Swan's kid, to swerve confusion over which 'Charlie' was being addressed.

"Jesus," Charlie grunted. "Is Jake even big enough to _carry_ the shopping?"

The Sheriff narrowed his consideration sidelong, wry. "While I appreciate the display of masculine cruelty in that question, kiddo, none of the Quileute boys are any shorter than me, anymore. Sam could put you through a wall if he sneezed."

Charlie closed his eyes to process this. "Okay. What are they dumping into that lake upshore, is what we oughta know."

"I had a point," the Sheriff said, "That had nothing to do with kids who play sports and actually eat their vegetables. I can't even give you that lecture, because Renee did neither of both and still turned out a whole head taller than me."

Charlie scoffed, kicking his foot up on the dash to aid in his slouch. His parents had married young, before either was past 20, and the human body didn't stop gaining height until its 25th year, statistically. Charlie still had time to catch up to the Quileute kids he used to kick with, if he maybe engaged in some of that aforementioned lifestyle upkeep. "What was your point, then," Charlie said, glancing wistfully out at the deep evergreen forest carved neatly through by the county road they'd turned down.

"My point was, ol' Bill isn't driving anything he can't get up in so easy, so he was looking to sell the truck."

"How much," Charlie asked, feigning disinterest. "No more than eight, right? It's diesel." 

"Eight... dollars? Eight maids a milking? Eight chucks a woodchuck chucked if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" The Sheriff reached over, and sure he had to reach a little higher than he used to, but he eventually found Charlie's damp tangle of curly black hair to ruffle.

Charlie pulled away from the affection, raked his hair back and cleared his throat. "I've only got budget for eight-hundred down on a clunker, not including gas, repairs, insurance. Renee took my credit card; summer job prospects in this town are kind of... uh." They both knew. Very little pay for lots of hard, grueling manual labor, corporate landscaping or McMansion yard work, seasonal orchard harvest or commercial fishing. No wonder the Quileute kids were getting big.

"Say now, when did you get so old and responsible?" the Sheriff asked, genuinely surprised that Charlie had put so much thought and planning into his future. "Bill just didn't want his '68 Chevy to rot in some junk hoarder's yard, cannibalized for parts. He just wanted to see it to good use."

The Patrol truck slowed to a cruise, county road fast approaching the sparse brick suburb that skirted Forks' town proper.

"Dad, how much," Charlie pressed, sitting forward, a weight in his stomach lifting as the first round curve of the familiar red truck peeked from the end of the Sheriff's gravel driveway.

The Sheriff only laughed, a low and flannel noise. "Don't worry about it, Chuck. You're gonna need your money for upkeep and repairs alone, if you drive half as badly as you can toss a shoe." Horseshoe, that was, the competition of aim and patience set up in the front yard as close to a sport as father and son had ever shared.

"Well," Charlie rallied, brushing a sting of wet from the corner of his eye as the Patrol truck trundled up the wide drive. It was a large, ungainly thing in all the frankenstein curves of its era, built to labor. "At least nobody at _Forks High_ will think I'm trying to compensate for any sort of, you know, personal _lack."_

"Every kid in that school has a truck," the Sheriff agreed. "They'll only know you're short if you're standing up."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [First iteration on FanFiction.net](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6582382/1/Twilight-GS-An-Epic-Rewrite)
> 
> Original manuscript (!unfinished) was written chapter-for-chapter off the first Twilight book, tried to borrow all the same PG-13 suspense and unrealistic themes inherent of genre romance, and couldn't get too graphic due to FFnet's content restriction.
> 
> Goals for this repost will be: remove a lot of the 'original' personality I had added to the Protagonist/s, because it's hard work to try and explain backgrounds and motives, and that only ultimately distances the reader; 
> 
> and season heavily with like 120% more sexual content, because y'all.
> 
> _Y'all._
> 
> I also plan to sew up some of the plot holes you'd find in the original books, re-interpret the lore, and bring all of what was successful about this fanfic's first manuscript to the forefront (realism added to the motives of the side-characters and antagonists, more dire stakes to the roadblocks in the main characters' romance, ambitious foreshadowing et c).
> 
> The goal of the first manuscript had been to rewrite Twilight (and eventually New Moon) in whole; but since I no longer have the vindictive stamina of a 20 yr old we'll condense those two rewrites into this single, massive overhaul and cut a lot of the filler that was already kind of tedious trying to re-interpret through Bernardo's PoV in the first place.
> 
> I'm also changing the narrative tense. All the challenge in the original rewrite was the First Person PoV past tense, and in lending a 'voice' to the narration - but again, this became a distancing metric that ended up more effort than reward.
> 
> Will be keeping the hilarious late-nineties, early-oughties technology because that ish rules #changemymind.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **C**ontent **W**arnings in the **End Notes** of each chapter.

# ✯

**C**asa Del Swan sat squat among the many other simple two-story brick prefabs that had popped up around the Olympic Coast in the suburb boom of the early 60s. Unfettered woodland crept up the property from the back, the front yard leading down a trim sparse lawn struggling to grow past the overwatered mud and all the wood chips laid down to contain the spill. At one point the meandering gravel driveway had been paved, but so frenetic was the weather of the territory that such concrete lasted two, maybe three winters before all that moisture and ice expansion had pulverized it back down to flakes. The roads in Forks were either ten-year tar or just plan dirt and nothing surviving any sort of in-between, not on a city budget already struggling to replace civil center rooftops, no.

The horseshoe pit was sand trimmed by wood, kept pristine by the Sheriff and his frequent social calls, the plastic lawn furniture set up beside sunk lopsided on its thin legs because there never really was any time to get that mudding deck bought and assembled and there never really was a neighbor known to complain. The people here had a knack for accepting discomfort, a passive regard to the inconveniences of life, a 'Charlie Brown' optimism, as it was said; a resignation to the perceived inevitability of their suffering.

The Sheriff's generation liked to credit the rain, for this.

Charlie's generation by and large didn't credit anything for public reception. Rain was depressing, people generally needed sunlight to keep in a good mood, medically, but the nuance of small-town resignation could be found in homelands as sunny as Afghanistan -- and answered to nothing but the dread of a post-industrialized economic frontier.

This fiscal neglect proved itself past the Sheriff's crumbling, soggy lawn to the sagging hips of the house's porch steps, and the mildew and algae taken hold of the brick to dapple it green and gray, no money for cosmetic repairs and so long as the bones of the house had been stuffed up in chemical foam insulation there was little enough incentive to keep up appearance. "House needs some work," Charlie mumbled as he crowded in behind his dad, the mosquito-screened claustrophobia of a cluttered porch made worse by armfuls of luggage.

"Yeah," Sheriff Swan answered, as if only just realizing, small-town resignation lifted like a hat only to be readjusted back down. "Guess it's getting on in years." He fumbled a suit case to wrangle the keys into their locks -- high security, see, two deadbolts and a handle stopper because there were guns in the house and monied yahoos in off the highway liked to disadvantage isolated neighborhoods for wont of higher technological security than barking dogs. And the Sheriff didn't even have a dog, his job too sporadic and demanding of his time, so he installed a lot of door tumblers, and anchored latchbars on the first story windows, and kept the small secured gun case in the kitchen, inside the oven, where Charlie only knew it lay from an adventurous summer trying to hide his weed.

The doors of Casa Del Swan were slightly undersized, the staircases both basement and to the second floor narrow, the counters oddly short in a way that suited the Swans' reach too well for the Sheriff to want for replacing. The kitchen still housed its original icebox, covered in magnets and photos, article clips and motor-oil fingerprints, a hulking immovable thing that now listed like a drunk on floorboards warped by weathering.

Charlie followed the Sheriff through the open, tiled foyer with the thoughtless habit of stepping out of his shoes, their shuffling free of heavy boot and mud-damp canvas squeaking wetly sole to heel like a second conversation, all the exhale and inhale of arriving to a familiar place in an unfamiliar circumstance. Charlie wasn't ever here for the off-season; not even for Christmas, which the Sheriff had always been happy to spend with his parents in SoCal.

This prodigal bachelor pad opened to a visibly new leather couch pinned stolid in the middle of the faded living room, facing a large and ancient television balanced spiritedly on painted cinderblocks. A decade's worth of cigarette tar stained the walls yellowish, gumming dust into the ceramic lacquer of the wild duck figurines on the fireplace mantle from when the Sheriff still smoked. Now in the summer the walls would sweat and the tar would run down in bright orange droplets to collect in the cobwebs neither of the Swan gentlemen felt any pressing need to sweep down.

The kitchen ran in the colors of its era, dark wood paneling preceding the burnt orange tile of a splash guard - white linoleum and cracking bakelite vinyl. The livingroom had been recently enough painted that Charlie could still smell it in the air, the scent of papery glue unique to high-humidity curing chemicals so as not to leave Washington livingrooms tacky in their Martha Stewart buttercream yellows.

The only bathroom in the house was large enough to fit a comfortably spacious soaking tub under its standing shower, but small enough to fit between the Master and Guest bedrooms, all three rooms dissecting the second floor with a long, thin hallway running beside the mouth of the staircase, the banister of which always used to scare Charlie as a kid -- for how low it stood and how easily one could topple over it to their doom. This fear had only grown with Charlie's height, his center of gravity overtaking the top of the banister rail in his twelfth year of life when he was at his most clumsy.

It was fear, then, that had kept Charlie out of trouble.

But much like a clean-nosed friend will gradually lose influence on their peers, so too did fear loosen its grip on Charlie's decision-making, and join him as a glad cohort in his risks.

A linen closet lay open on the way to Charlie's bedroom, nittling and badly matched towels half fallen out against each other, visible proof of his father's declining struggle with middle-aged depression. Charlie himself had found a new interest in laundry folding earlier that year, brought on by a forced sobriety and a mind spinning itself in hungry circles for want of fidget. Maybe the Sheriff had found insobriety to still his fidgets by, if the beer gut was any implication.

Charlie's room had been neatly made up for his arrival, a lone twin-sized bed put in fresh sheets with the coverlet tucked drum-tight, military style. The soft wooden study desk had a new coat of buttercream paint over its nicks and spots of mildew, the rickety rolling chair with the busted wheel a few new paint stains. A window had been opened to its screen to help air out the smell of the National Geographic left in rotting towers in the closet. When Charlie tugged the delicate chain for the ceiling fan, the string snapped and the lightbulb popped in a bright flash, extinguishing, burnt out.

# ✯

Charlie woke clammy and a little disoriented, finding the face in his wardrobe mirror quite removed from the tribal stock that the Sheriff had passed down from his paternal namesake. Charlie's eyes were Renee's Italian, large and sleepy and languidly blue. His hair was black, sure, but curled in the humidity to betray the Swan side of the family as Jewish immigrant more than Quileute Indigenous, petite from generational starvation and nervous from (understandable) generational anxiety. This separation from Forks township's WASPy populous would do nothing to endear Charlie with his classmates, but might haunt him with a vague sense of guilt, for spending so many summers apart from the La Push tribe and all his familial friendships therein -- as if the separation had found him grown at a separate pace, shaped instead by Phoenix's metropolitan cynicism, paled and made fat in overnight diners when he could have been getting tall and tan mowing soggy Washington lawns and shoveling snowy Washington driveways.

Charlie dressed for school with all the stiff-kneed dread of nostalgia, the cool cotton of his denims heavy against the waking fever-sweat of his nerves. He'd never attended the local public institutions, no, only summer visits under his dad's custody and half of those spent in the La Push trailer park. An unsettling absence of personal effects called from his luggage, an unmet expectation, a void to answer his reach for the sundries that would otherwise decorate his persons. Renee had thrown a lot of his clothing away, too, packed it up and donated it to what thrift stores would dare cater to The Yoot -- but the makeup and the facial piercings had gone directly into the trash before Charlie had even been delivered back home by his case worker.

Excitement began to build behind Charlie's anxiety -- this was something of a fresh start, really. He didn't have to work so hard to stake out some individuality, a graduating class of about 70 was a lot easier to impress than 2,000. He pondered how the tone of the fistfights might change, stalling over his bowl of inoffensive oat-based breakfast gruel, what injuries would he receive, which teachers would look the other way about locker-room rape, if there was anybody on staff repressed enough by any sort of sequestered fundamentalist religion to trade good grades for blowjobs.

All the teachers in Phoenix had been emotionally intelligent, healthy, over-polished beings Charlie could hardly tell were even human. They were pod-persons there to make a good impression with even the surliest of rebels, too smart and too compassionate and too goddamn patient. They were middle management, the HR rep you invite to your holiday parties who won't tell her boss you all deserve a living wage. Nobody in Charlie's pantheon of childhood education would have risked their jobs to protect the students from things like administrative shaming of female bodies in the summer heat, or wholesale racism against the Latinx and adjacently brown students given up to random police harassment for immigration papers.

Most of Arizona was either brown, poor, or angry; sometimes all three. But the people in charge, like the teachers and law enforcement, had been overwhelmingly white, affluent, and cruel in their optimism, acting from a place of delusion.

Except for Gordon.

Maybe the teachers at Forks High would be more like Gordon -- sleepy, cynical, sad. Reachable. 

Charlie wasn't supposed to refer to Gordon as Gordon, and wasn't that proof of theory? That authority figures operate on degrees of stratification, and to humanize them too intimately is a challenge against that power?

Had that been Charlie's actual crime, then, dismantling the framework of public school hierarchy so obliquely?

Charlie was supposed to address Gordon as 'Mr. Avenier', if he was allowed to talk about the guy at all, which he wasn't. Maybe once the kitchen table conversation with the Sheriff graduated from future academic goals to relevant social history Charlie would have the opportunity to talk about Gordon, and word it carefully enough to include him as just another boyfriend in the lineup of many. But until then the story didn't need addressing, either to the credit of Renee's mortification or an actual NDA put forward by the courts, who knew.

Teeth brushed, stiff new jacket wrapped tight against the cold fog, Charlie followed the Sheriff out the front door. "They're going to call attendance," Charlie whined at his father's back. "And they're going to say Bernardo. And I'll never survive." The inclement weather was crawling across Charlie's nerves, upsetting him from the usual brash overconfidence that had seen him to such high social success.

"Get there early and introduce yourself to the teachers, then." Charlie Sr. winked before ducking into his cruiser. He honked his horn and waved, cheerful in one of those rare moments he got to be the smug parent who knew tough situations were actually good for a growing young person's development. Or some shit. Charlie would short-sheet his bed later.

Forks High was a good forty-five minute drive away, Charlie perched forward behind an unfamiliar wheel to navigate unfamiliar roads in unfamiliar fog. His stomach sank when he found the school, panicked he'd taken a wrong turn and already running late.

Charlie's foremost worry, aside from showing up in the middle of a semester as the town Sheriff's only rumored child, aside from even being the gayest thing to hit this small town since sliced bread, was the sudden downward trajectory Charlie's artschool career was going to faceplant against. Any public school this tiny was going to be underfunded, by the very nature of how America funded its schools, which for Charlie meant limited course options. No opportunity to recoup any outstanding academic merit. Where oh where to find a portfolio workshop or a club studio or, hell, the library.

The school in Phoenix had its own library, its own cafe, studio, auditorium, everything. Forks High was just a school, and all the outro buildings belonging to the city proper, clustered downtown nearer the court house. Even the football field had been constructed a few blocks away, though that was more geographical awareness for drainage so as not to swamp the games.

Charlie took a circuit around the lot to gain his bearings, locating student parking by all the similarly beaten up old clunkers; though a few of the staff had braved some very shiny convertibles amongst the rabble -- or else some shitty celebrity family had taken up to gentrifying the coast, and enrolled their shitty celebrity kids here for, like, character building or some shit. Likelier to happen in Arizona, but the Olympic Coast had anything if not cheap housing, property low in demand. Charlie clambered out of his truck smelling like gasoline and tobacco, ready to Fit In with all the other kids in their denim and flannel and gasoline tobacco, having been denied his makeup and refused his bling.

Something about the fresh air put a brace in Charlie's confidence, cold slipping in under the button-down he hadn't tucked into his jeans, nipples stiffening almost painfully for lack of undershirt. Thermals he used to wear in Arizona's treeless, frigid desert nightfall had been chucked with all his other on-brand clothing, because they'd been black and Renee hadn't been thinking much further past her immediate retaliation.

Charlie tightened his jacket shut as he swung his truck door shut, too soon indoors to bother with the zipper, and grateful for the shock to his system besides. The Sheriff didn't have a coffeemaker, because his office did. 

There was a mood to the scenery here that also did well by Charlie's concentration in a way the truck ride's cigarette had not. Washington's cloudcover took up every season to filter sunlight in a cold, natural wash that leant a clarity wherever mist and fog weren't romantically obfuscating atmospheric distance. This was rare weather in Phoenix, usually restricted to early morning or the odd winter rainfall, and Charlie was glad to see it, nervous headache eased from all the squinting he'd expect of a timely sunrise.

Maybe Charlie would have found a better use for this town in his old age, when all avenues of professional artistic merit had been pursued through their large urban collectives; and all the other coasts traveled, seen, partied on. It was good painting atmosphere, great for photography, light diffused and easy to rebalance. Did the people inside this school even know how lucky they were, that their soc-med photos needed less doctoring? That they were living under the sexiest type of photo filter?

Did they realize that of themselves, under this filter, realtime? Or was it a degrees-of-removal problem, like appreciation for regional temperatures, and Charlie alone to his bundling against the cold and half-chubs for the sexy natural light.

The school's front office sat awash in the liminal yellow lighting that had been popular before the invention of eco-friendly halogen. The carpet confirmed the town's financial struggle with appropriately commercial grey flecked through by orange and yellow. Papers and posters elbowed in over age-brittled clear tape left behind on the windows, a clock loudly antagonizing tick-tickety in the hallowed silence of an uncaffeinated clerical building. Squat and weirdly modern chairs lined the reception with stiff stain-resistant vinyl, in case someone was carried bleeding to the nurse's office and there was a waitlist or some shit.

There were no metal detectors, though probably half the student population had their own literal actual guns.

Would a school like this be easier to score pot from, or worse? Would Charlie have to bum around the community college in Port Angeles for anything approaching normal recreation, much less a more worldly and viable dating pool?

A large red-haired woman was watering the many potted plants lining the front desk, and set the neon plastic watering can aside to greet Charlie's approach. "Hey hon, can I help you?"

"I'm Ch - er, Bernardo Swan." Charlie winced, the name sour in his mouth. "You can call me Charlie."

Dina-with-the-diner-marm-glasses gave Charlie a look that suggested she didn't expect to call him anything, and that if his name showed up on any announcements or summons she was going to read it as-is.

Charlie bit his cheek, glancing to the side. "If you want."

"You don't remember me, hm?"

Charlie squinted, grip tight on his backpack strap. Exhaled. "Sorry, no. If you dated my dad, you have my apologies."

Dina laughed, and passed a thin manila folder over a dusty succulent in a trout themed ceramic. "I married your dad's cousin." She held the folder firm, wouldn't release it to Charlie's take right away. "We've got eyes on you, buster."

Charlie nodded, nonplussed. His lack of reaction had more to do with assuming that _all_ figures of authority kept a pretty even amount of vigilance for the people under their boots, family or not; and not because, you know, he didn't know what she was talking about.

But Dina-with-the-glasses liked to assume the best of people, especially young people, having never served the type of administrative role to expose her to knife-fights and toilet hooch, and assumed that Sheriff Swan's kid really just hadn't ever done anything all that wrong, and the rumors were not to be believed, and Charlie's lack of reaction was genuine puzzlement. Kid that came from a man like Sheriff Swan, what wrong could he get up to? She relented the folder, smiling warmly, all wrinkles and thick makeup foundation. "Go on and grab a cocoa from the cafeteria. First period's only homeroom, you won't miss much if you just leave them undisturbed, hey?"

Charlie's nod sharpened, cheeks tensing in trying not to smile. Perk of his position, nepotism. He thanked Dina and took his leave, cracking the folder open to peruse his schedule and the layout of the school as he wandered its halls. It was hard to feel any kind of intimidated, once he was actually at the school he'd so dreaded confronting; because everything here was just _less_.

Fewer people. Less rush. Less pressure. Way way, way less danger. Fewer academic commodities, sure, but also less stress. He'd already tested out to AP credits and was only in his Junior year, and might end up in classes with Seniors -- a surefire credit to his looming popularity. In Phoenix, Charlie had been just another pottery mom's degenerate, a face of alternative in the increasingly indie hipster crowd.

Here, Charlie Swan was the only pierced face, in so many words, and his worries shifted from bullying and exclusion to what kind of impression he'd have to front so as not to misrepresent his dad. Sheriffs were still assigned by election, after all, and Chief Swan didn't need any drama tarnishing his good reputation.

Rather than suss out the location of the cafeteria, Charlie hooked a left through the trim and ungraffitied hall of lockers for the building's west exit to find the parking lot again, now an hour free to seek out that coffee he needed, tempted to just drop in on the Sheriff for his cardboard cup of office drip.

A clean gray Volvo was rolling up to student parking to join the 'nice cars' section near the track field, and Charlie waited half stood in his truck to harass the driver because come the fuck on. "You're late for homeroom," Charlie teased once he confirmed the driver was, indeed, a student and not some sort of lost TA.

The pale guy removing his 200-dollar haircut from his obviously rich mom's obvious loaner glanced up with half a smirk, but Charlie was already shut in his truck, revving the engine to brag his freedom before he pulled into gear and hauled out.

Eventually, Charlie realized he could have invited the latecomer along with, if only to start a conversation on where to find a cafe in this no-horse town. But these are the moments that carve themselves through histories innumerable, every smallest hit or miss keeping their difference not unlike the chips of marble that are taken or left, so that those remaining make up the whole, and those pieces removed serve their absence to better define the shape.

# ✯

In-town Forks was not so large and sprawling that Charlie could get lost, nor be late in getting back to school with his franchise breakfast restaurant coffee. The morning's transition passed easy, Charlie delivered from truck to rainy morning parking lot to school building to assigned locker before the bell, styrofoam takeaway cup in hand. He was stalled for lack of combination lock, the school operating on an archaic system of trust. 

Charlie didn't consider himself a criminal element, per se, but his imagination was haunted with how much he could get away with in a school like this, a nervous intrusion of thoughts about fertilizer bombs and hunting rifles and stuffing stolen beer into an enemy's locker to frame them. He let his locker door swing shut on its tilted hinges and stabbed a knuckle up at the slotted handle a few times to see if it even latched.

Lugging his books around was going to be a pain, but Charlie had to honor his hard-won paranoia and it didn't seem like the school had any policy against backpacks in class. He settled in to the room for Comparative Literature at a back row desk to watch the rest of the class file in, nodding once or twice to inquisitive glances, sipping his coffee. 

It was clear everyone knew everyone else in this town, much less between the attendants of this school -- so everyone knew that Charlie was, well, new. Most spoke with determination to remain aloof, conversation steered to homework and homelife and homecoming; one or two managed to mutter one or two questions to one or two peers, hushed disbelief, whose homeroom was the new kid even in, did anybody have his name.

Mr. Mason arrived with the updated rollcall in hand, and announced Charlie by name -- Bernardo Swan -- to hand him the list of reading he had sofar missed. One or two friends shared one or two laughs, but the read on the room suggested a school full of kids with names like Xachariah, Annamaybelle and Clarence had no standing by which to mock the full name of another. Renee had gone to school with most of their parents, after all, this was probably an entire generation of offspring given goofy romanticized names with whom Charlie could goddamn relax.

"Are you related to Sheriff Swan?" a teenaged Luigi asked from the desk ahead, as soon as the class bell rang.

"Naw, man. Must be a coincidence," Charlie lied, curling his hands loose around his coffee, content to wait for the class to file out ahead of him and spare the run of inspections.

Not-Luigi scoffed, and offered a long, bony hand forward as he stood. "You need any help getting around, you can ask me. Name's Eric. Yorkie."

"Call me Charlie," Charlie instructed, with enough grim masculinity required of such a plea.

Eric jerked his chin up, a nod of respect. "What's your next class, Charlie-not-Swan's-kid?"

Charlie hawed consideration, pulling himself bodily up from his desk, coffee half gone but too cooled to finish off. "Government." Then, because good will would get him further than frigidity, "You?"

Eric took Charlie's bag over his shoulder, and then piled Charlie's book atop his, tall enough perhaps to assume the hospitality necessary. "Same. You find your locker yet?"

Charlie blinked, thoroughly unused to such exacting goodwill, which was par for the area and not much that anyone else would remark. To Charlie, Eric's friendliness was a setup toward a fall, or some condescension that Charlie just didn't have the toolset to counter, having never before been 'niced' into a fight.

"I did find the locker, yeah," Charlie answered woodenly, hands full of nothing but the coffee he had planned to toss in the trash on the way out, but now didn't want to abandon for lack of anything else to do with his hands. He knew Eric wasn't _hitting_ on him, but that didn't change the way it felt, especially to a prickly inner-city cynic who had been expecting expletives and spitballs instead. "Kind of don't trust lockers that don't actually, you know, _lock_."

Eric chuckled, and lead the way from the classroom, containing their conversation from any curious interruption with all the austere body language that only two kindred brosephs deep in conversation could share. Eric was a 'cool kid', a title in short supply, and knew Charlie's ilk by the coffee in his hand and the slouch in his shuffle, and walked now hawk-eyed against any greedy interlopers, a social bodyguard. "You're from Arizona, right?"

Charlie winced. Just how much information could get around between neighbors, anyway? "For a given value of 'from'. I winter there sometimes, sure." The lies came easily, and perhaps were just as easily believed, for whatever spare crumb of mystique Charlie could build up around himself. "You from around here?"

"Born and raised," Eric said, pragmatic in his confidence. "I was thinking you'd be more tan, but I'm darker than you?"

Charlie slowed his step to hint that they were approaching his locker, in case Eric wanted to relent his burden, and shrugged with his mouth. "Yeah my dad carries more nation than I do, and _he_ looks like Billy Crystal had a baby with Billy Bob Thornton. Just, way too many billies for one person."

"Well I mean," Eric interjected, clearly uncomfortable with speaking on race in the middle of a school that still didn't enroll reservation denizens. "Arizona is sunny?"

"Sunnier than God's asshole, but most of my hobbies take place at night," Charlie admitted, slapping his locker open to illustrate its flimsy security. "Or indoors. And besides, there's not really a lot of beach-going in the desert. You'll catch cancer before you'll be able to develop that seasonal glow." He wiggled his fingers, miming radiation.

Eric nodded along to the casual expletive, stuffing Charlie's Comparative Literature book into the empty hollow clang of his locker, but keeping the bag for convenience, in case Charlie had any difficulty getting here in between classes. "Most people in this town get their tans on vacation, or at Summer Gillespie's parents' salon-spa, but a pretty grody outbreak of staff three years ago kinda put a stigma against it."

Charlie hummed, grimacing, and elbowed his locker shut. Let his books get stolen, sure. Who fucking would. "Maybe I'm not this Sheriff-Swan's kid from sunny Arizona, then," Charlie insisted, taking a peek at the gaggle of girls following behind them. "Maybe I'm just a different guy. Just a _new_ new kid. What if I'm actually from New York, and I killed Bernardo and stole his wallet and only showed up here to get off on the deception? What then."

Eric grinned along. "You look just like the guy on the bus stop voteys, man, what can I say. House parties forever doomed, because nobody wants to crash in on _the law_."

Which had never crossed Charlie's concern, but served a good enough excuse in his attempt to distance himself from the curious. "I'm more of the type of guy who crashes the parties than hosts them, anyway." The idea of stuffing 20-odd celebrants into the Sheriff's sad old house was an uncomfortable one, even if Renee's home had seen its fair share of broken vases and puke stains.

Eric held their meander back, to let the next into the classroom ahead of them, and handed Charlie his bookbag. "Welp, welcome to Forks, if it hasn't been said yet. We'll try to keep your family ties on the down low, but law enforcement is about as close as we get to royalty around here, so," he clicks air in past a molar. "Sorry. You're it."

Charlie hesitated to correct his new townie friend, that the term 'on the down low' was an exclusively queer one. Or maybe the guy was dropping hints, who knew? Charlie watched Eric meet his peers at the perimeter tables of the room, trying to judge sexual spectrum out of his sk8er jeans and hockey jersey and seeing only someone who would grow up to never marry, and smoke a lot of weed on the way.

Eric Yorkie's steadfast new presence in Charlie Swan's life would prove pivotal, because Eric Yorkie knew Mike Newton and Jessica Stanley, who greeted Eric now with only a little surprise under Eric's casual introduction of Charlie Swan, who had been absent from homeroom rollcall this morning and no hadn't gotten lost and yes had skipped to get this coffee and no hadn't put anything in it except cream and sugar but Charlie liked the way Mike was thinking and would do just fine with his company.

Mike was from California, see, and had the summer tan and surfing tatts to prove it. And Jessica was a locally grown gossip, and cared very deeply for her trendy and collectible emigrant friends. Charlie Swan would become the fourth ninja turtle to complete their group, snagged back into their circle of support in times of social strain by Eric's unrelenting good will.

Such support would linger even when the friendship of Charlie Swan would start to carry a sort of threat-by-association. The gay thing, even in a town this small, was hardly going to matter; but eventually, Bernardo 'Charlie' Swan was going to be in danger, and doom would fall to anyone who would try to save him from it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: masturbation, substance abuse, casual rumination of rape


End file.
